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A Gift From the Musical Gods

ON Friday, March 19, 1965, Maria Callas returned to the Metropolitan Opera after a seven-year absence. The work was Puccini’s “Tosca”; it was one of the most anticipated nights in Met history.

The next day Harold Schonberg reported in The New York Times that Callas’s first entrance had set off a wave of applause that stopped the performance for several minutes. There were 16 curtain calls at the end. In between she was thrilling. “Her conception of the role,” Schonberg wrote, “was electrical.”

If you’ve experienced enough performances and you’ve had any luck at all, you’re sure to have felt this kind of electricity.

Charisma, critics like to call it nowadays. In recent months I’ve referred in reviews in The Times to “the charismatic Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky,” “the charismatic Hélène Grimaud” and “the quietly charismatic folk singer and songwriter Sam Amidon.” I’ve called a pianist’s Allegro finale “sparklingly charismatic” and a countertenor “warmly charismatic.” Of a benefit concert for Japan I said that the closing rock and pop acts “featured a dazzling variety of charismatic frontwomen.”

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Maria Callas performing in “Tosca” at the Metropolitan Opera, after a seven-year absence, on March 19, 1965.Credit
Louis Mlanon/Metropolitan Opera Archives

It’s a term used a lot but one too often skimmed over. When an artist is described as charismatic, I know what’s meant. You know what’s meant. But what is meant?

To experience a charismatic performance is to feel elevated, simultaneously dazed and focused, galvanized and enlarged. It is to surrender to something raw and elemental, to feel happy but also unsatisfied. Charisma calls forth a melancholy, a vaguely unrequited feeling. I’ve caught myself, after certain performances of an aria or a movement, leaning forward, as if drawn against my will.

Charisma requires that you acknowledge a new, larger set of possibilities. It is demanding. We are told of Callas’s overwhelming use of her body and voice onstage. As Schonberg added, of that 1965 “Tosca,” “the stage presence shown by Callas in her performance would have raised the hackles on a deaf man.”

It is a pure, mystifying gift. It cannot be taught, though silly how-to blog posts proliferate (“Eight Keys to Instant Charisma”). Someone who has it will exude it, whether performing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” or Scarlatti, Mimi or Marguerite. Charisma is not earned with age; an artist is charismatic at 16 or 60. Rigorous training enhances and focuses it, but it cannot create it. The young tenor Vittorio Grigolo, who made his Met debut last year in Puccini’s “Bohème,” is still getting used to being and singing onstage, but his charisma is unmistakable.

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Christian TetzlaffCredit
Daniel Barry for The New York Times

There are people who try to manufacture charisma by overacting or choosing music that goes very fast or very high, people who attempt to fascinate with technique; but someone who is truly charismatic is riveting from the start.

We now have a culture, particularly in classical music and opera, in which the technical ability of artists is far more impressive than ever before. (Anthony Tommasini, concentrating on pianists, wrote eloquently to this point in The Times a week ago.)

But charisma is not virtuosity or intelligence or perceptive programming. Christian Tetzlaff is a searchingly creative, technically flawless violinist, but he isn’t charismatic. Joshua Bell, less innovative if just as virtuosic, is. Mr. Grigolo is; Piotr Beczala, a far more elegant and accomplished tenor, isn’t. It is one of the frustrating aspects of following culture that the artists we wish were charismatic aren’t always the ones who are.

While charisma would seem to be a subjective judgment, there is remarkable unanimity to our recognition of it. We know it when we see it. People don’t argue about it as much as they argue about other artistic judgments; they tend to agree. Reviewing a recital featuring the countertenor David Daniels in The Times in April I wrote that “his charisma and softly velvet tone were no surprise”; two weeks ago Mr. Tommasini reported from Santa Fe, N.M., that Mr. Daniels, appearing in Vivaldi’s “Griselda,” sang “with the expected virtuosity and charisma.”

A performer who has it can turn it neither on nor off, but it often crystallizes in certain moments. At the end of the first act of Janacek’s “Makropulos Case,” Emilia Marty, a great diva, is preparing to leave a lawyer’s office. Playing Marty at the Met in 1998, Catherine Malfitano put on her coat and elbow-length gloves and sunglasses with excruciating deliberation before gliding out precisely as the music ended, a mesmerizing opera in miniature.

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Vittorio Grigolo in “Manon.”Credit
Bill Cooper

Last fall the soprano Marina Poplavskaya took the leading roles in two new Verdi productions at the Met: Elisabetta in “Don Carlo” and Violetta in “La Traviata.” Ms. Poplavskaya’s voice is more interesting than beautiful; it can be thin and acidulous, and her breathing is a mess. But she has charisma.

In “Don Carlo,” when Elisabetta learns that her lady in waiting has betrayed her, she demands the return of a small cross. Ms. Poplavskaya held out her hand for the piece, and more than the focus of her eyes, the tension in her arm or the positioning of her fingers, her presence made the moment newly shattering.

In the second act of “Traviata,” after Violetta has agreed to give up her lover, Ms. Poplavskaya came to the lip of the stage and sang “Dite alla giovine” with exquisite fragility, appearing suddenly waiflike. Another singer might have mimicked her posture in either opera, might have sung more brilliantly, but it was her charisma that rendered both passages unforgettable.

It’s no coincidence that these moments depend on physical presence. Charisma operates most strongly on a visual level; it’s telling that when we need another way of describing someone’s possession of it, we say, “You can’t take your eyes off her.” Audio recordings can be modified to create an illusion of command. Film, showing the power itself, never lies.

Charisma would seem to be a fragile quality, but it reproduces with ease. Watch Renata Scotto in “Lucia di Lammermoor” in a 1967 performance in Japan: she is plump and cuter than she is striking, but her Lucia is magnetic. Even watching the DVD you find yourself holding your breath, gasping when she suddenly drops her knife in the mad scene.

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Joshua BellCredit
Richard Termine for The New York Times

Fully to capture what we mean by charisma we now rely on the language of physical forces — magnetism, electricity — but for the Greeks it was, simply, favor. Charis, whose name meant beauty and kindness, was an attendant to Aphrodite, the goddess of love.

The word appears throughout the New Testament, most often translated as “grace.” In Christian theology gifts from God are called “charismata.” These gifts can be as varied as knowledge, healing, miracles or prophecy and as grand as redemption itself. Charismata came to refer especially to the graces given to individuals specifically for the good of others: the gift that keeps on giving.

It wasn’t until the 20th century that the word acquired its modern secular meaning, when the influential sociologist Max Weber borrowed it to describe a key quality of leadership.

“Charisma,” he wrote, “is a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman or specifically exceptional powers. These qualities are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader.”

But how is a performer a leader? Other writers have built on Weber’s work in the social sciences, but much less attention has been paid to charisma in culture. The problem is that when it comes to the arts, the uses of charisma become harder to pin down. When Bill Clinton is charismatic, you vote for him. When an obscure carpenter’s son in ancient Galilee is charismatic, you join his ministry. But when the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter is charismatic, or Callas or Mr. Amidon, what are you supposed to do? What happens? Is our applause enough?

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Piotr Beczala as Edgardo and Diana Damrau in the title role in “Lucia di Lam-mermoor."Credit
Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

To some, charisma has lost its power as descriptive. It connotes flash, smoke and mirrors. (You could slightly change my sentence about Mr. Tetzlaff to turn it into praise: “He may not be charismatic, but he is a searchingly creative, technically flawless violinist.”) Even when used as a compliment, “charismatic” is often taken for granted. Just look at Mr. Tommasini’s and my takes on Mr. Daniels: his charisma is “no surprise” and “expected.” Charisma is a given, we imply, so let’s move on to the real stuff.

Let’s assume for a moment that charisma is the real stuff, less a means than an end in itself. What we generally consider the “content” of the arts — the notes, the libretto, the bowings, the plot — is actually just the structure that makes possible the crucial thing: watching a performer who is able to connect with fundamental realities. It is not that a singer’s charisma makes a colorful aria sound even better but that the aria provides a platform, a vessel, for us to experience the charisma.

If charisma were recognized as the central experience of performance, then that experience would take on a ritualistic aspect. Art as we know it, centered on rigorously conceived structures and intricately deployed catharses, would become more inchoate, less an appeal to our intelligence or taste than to instincts that we barely acknowledge.

Charisma is the essential quality of our moment because it fits so well in a culture in which the connoisseurship of artistic technique — whether singing or instrumental playing or conducting — has declined, but institutions are still seeking new audiences for these complex, demanding art forms. It is a quality that requires no knowledge or preparation. Even if you know little about the technicalities of music, when you attend a performance by the pianist Evgeny Kissin, you are swept up by his power and presence.

The question is whether people want to be swept up. Charisma can be exhilarating but also frightening. Our surrender to it demands a trust that is not easily conceded. If our desire from performance is only for comfort and reassurance, charisma will repel us. It is about revealing scope, and it raises the stakes dangerously high.

Recently I was in the Met Opera Shop, and a video clip came on the screen above the CD racks. The longtime Met soprano Aprile Millo was singing “La mamma morta,” the ecstatic aria from Giordano’s “Andrea Chenier,” with burning intensity. The sales clerk and I both watched raptly. Later I e-mailed Ms. Millo to ask her what charisma is.

“Hemingway gave us a haunting clue to it,” she replied. “In his obsession with the Spanish bullfights, he spoke of the lust of the crowd and its desire to feel something special, a raw authenticity, even in so brutal a setting. What he mentions is the hush that would come over the crowd at the entrance of the toreadors. The people could sense the difference between those who did it for the fame, the paycheck, and those who had the old spirit: the nobility, bravery, heart, ‘duende.’ I believe this also happens in the theater. The crowd can sense the one with the authentic message, the connection to the truth.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 21, 2011, on Page AR1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Gift From the Musical Gods. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe